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As a boy, Esteban Avila had only a skinny old horse and two pairs of pants, and he lived in a swampy neighborhood called The Toad. He felt stranded across a river from the rest of the world and wondered about life on the other side. He saw merchants pay bands to serenade them in the village plaza and dreamed of doing the same. He had a girlfriend but no hope of marrying her because her father was the village butcher and expected a good life for his daughter. Then Avila found an elixir and took it with him when, at 19, he went to the United States. It was black-tar heroin, and selling it turned his nightmare into a fairy tale. Avila was part of a migration of impoverished Mexican sugar...

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As a boy, Esteban Avila had only a skinny old horse and two pairs of pants, and he lived in a swampy neighborhood called The Toad. He felt stranded across a river from the rest of the world and wondered about life on the other side.
He saw merchants...

Whatever the root of the somewhat anti-climactic countdown, there is still plenty of activity going on around the dates, September 16 and November 20. The federal government has a dynamic bicentennial Website up, and on Thursday announced plans to exhume the r

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